TCP flow control in routers

In recent research of TCP/IP great effort has been put on enhancing the flow and congestion control mechanisms. However, even with all of the enhancements, TCP connections still experience high loss rates, especially during times of congestion. To alleviate this problem, intelligent queue management techniques have been introduced (like RED and its variants) for deployment in the network. In this paper we propose a TCP flow control technique, based on controlling the flow of acknowledgement (Ack) packets according to the level of congestion at the routers. In this way packet loss can significantly be reduced and even eliminated in the network, thus improving the goodput of TCP connections and assuring a high fairness among them. Moreover, this flow control technique is computationally inexpensive and does not require any modification of the existing TCP protocol at the end systems, neither per active-flow accounting of TCP connections. We present measurement results to show the usefulness of the algorithms.